Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature
Volume 33
Issue 2 Identities on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown: The Case of Spain
Article 9
6-1-2009
A Vindication of the Spanish Mother. Maternal
Images in the Filmic Make-over of the Nation
Andrés Zamora
Vanderbilt University
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Zamora, Andrés (2009) "A Vindication of the Spanish Mother. Maternal Images in the Filmic Make-over of the Nation," Studies in 20th
& 21st Century Literature: Vol. 33: Iss. 2, Article 9. http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1706
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A Vindication of the Spanish Mother. Maternal Images in the Filmic Makeover of the Nation
Abstract
The maternal figure as an explicit or oblique image of the Spanish nation has undergone a good share of
indignities throughout the modern cultural history of the country, from the nineteenth-century Mater
Dolorosa to the stepmother of those forced into exile after the civil war, from the terrible matriarchs of Benito
Peréz Galdós, Federico Garcia Lorca and Camilo José Cela to the patriarchal mothers of Spanish oppositional
cinema in the final phase of the dictatorship and first years of the democratic transition. This latter avatar of
the Spanish mother, so well reconstructed by Marsha Kinder, had the bewildering destiny of being both the
displaced incarnation of authoritarian power and the object of the rebellion and the violent ire of her
offspring. After the demise of the Franco regime, one of the most urgent tasks of the new democratic period
was to produce a redefinition of the Spanish national identity, sequestered and monopolized for so many years
by the ideological patchwork of the dictatorship. Towards that end, contemporary Spanish cinema has
undertaken an extraordinary revision and vindication of the mother against the dire history of her evil or
martyred antecedents, as a fundamental, though subtle, gesture in the attempt to rebuild, suture, and make
over the nation.
This article is available in Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol33/iss2/9
Zamora: A Vindication of the Spanish Mother. Maternal Images in the Filmi
A Vindication of the Spanish Mother: Maternal Images in
the Filmic Make-over of the Nation
Andrés Zamora
Vanderbilt University
At the end of Camada negra ‘Black Brood,’ a young apprentice in
Fascism concludes his militant initiation into the ranks by repeatedly crushing his lover’s head with a rock while he intones with nationalistic fervor, “Spain … Spain … Spain.” The movie, directed
by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón in 1977, two years after Francisco
Franco’s death, tells the contemporary story of a band of ultra-right
terrorists organized around a family that operates under the fanatical tutelage of an authoritarian matriarch, widow of a fallen hero
of the Francoist crusade. The group’s intent is to safeguard the political, moral, and cultural foundations of the dictatorship against
the forces of democratic change, as well as to preserve at all costs
and through any means the monolithic idea of the Spanish nation
imposed by that regime. Arguably this context could help to alleviate the perplexity caused by such a final act of violence perpetrated
upon an attractive, though lower class, single mother by an adolescent lover who, by his own admission just before killing her, likes
the woman very much. The horrific deed makes up in symbolism
what it lacks in practicality or sentimental congruence, since the
victim might represent a threatening rival, a menacing alternative,
to the biological and political matriarch, that is, to the incarnation
of Franco’s Spain in the figurative economy of the film. Thus the patriotic litany—“Spain … Spain … Spain”—should be understood as
the unambiguous identification of the cause and beneficiary of the
action, interchangeably the mother and the motherland. However,
we cannot discount the possibility of a perverse audience that reads
the scene by taking the words of the killer as the compulsive repeti-
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tion of the name of the victim: “Spain … Spain … Spain.” In fact,
although seemingly opposite, both readings can—and maybe ought
to be—conflated. Marsha Kinder has pointed out that Rosa, the illfated lover, “functions as a surrogate for Blanca,” the matriarch, and
as such constitutes “an object of both incestuous desire and matricide” (Blood 206). The resulting nationalist conundrum can be laid
out as follows: the young Falangist ends up massacring Spain—old
and/or new, past and/or future, as allegorized by the two generations of mothers—on behalf of Spain, to protect Spain, as proof of
his passion for Spain.
The final blows of Camada negra are an eloquent example of
the penultimate chapter in the long series of loving crimes or criminal loves against the dyad mother-nation executed in the battlefields
of Spanish culture and, I daresay, although I would hardly venture
into that territory, of Spanish history. In this chronicle of unavoidable chiasmus and chasms, the maternal figure qua image of the
nation has undergone a good share of indignities during most of the
modern cultural history of the country. In an exhaustive study, significantly entitled Mater dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX
‘Mater Dolorosa. The Idea of Spain in the 19th Century,’ José Alvarez
Junco has profusely documented the strong tendency in a great part
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to produce a maternal representation of Spain that pathologized and “miserabilized” her, that
subjected her to a rhetoric of victimhood and that reduced her to
the condition of a powerless martyr. In poems, engravings, political
cartoons, essays, newspaper articles, and oratorical pieces, the imagery of the nation is that of a suffering mother, emaciated and anemic, frequently on her knees or lying sick in bed, dressed in rags or
mourning garments, decrepit, humiliated and pitiable, occasionally
tortured and even nailed to a cross (Alvarez 567-70). The difference
with the imposing Germania, the powerful and dignified Britannia,
and the handsome Marianne could not be more striking.
At the turn of the twentieth century, a new set of images began
to overlap and compete with the previous icons of victimization and
malaise.1 First, Antonio Machado, and later, exiled writers such as
Luis Cernuda, in the early Post-Civil War period, and Juan Goytisolo, in the final stages of the Franco regime, identified the nation
with growing bitterness with the ominous figure of the stepmother:
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“La madre en otro tiempo fecunda en capitanes, / madrastra es hoy
apenas de humildes ganapanes” ‘The mother, long ago fruitful in
captains, / is today scarcely stepmother of humble laborers’ (Machado 138); “Es ella, la madrastra / Original de tantos, como tú, dolidos,
/ De ella y por ella dolientes” ‘It is she, the original / Stepmother of
so many like you, hurt / On her account and hurt because of her’
(Cernuda 386); “adiós, Madrastra inmunda, país de siervos y señores” ‘farewell, filthy Stepmother, country of servants and masters’
(Goytisolo 88). In the former images of the suffering and martyred
Spanish mother, the causes of the nation’s ills ranged from the viral
to the cancerous, from external foes to dissident insiders, although
oftentimes the latter were systematically deemed anti-Spanish and
thus effectively denaturalized, made foreign, especially during the
Franco years. However, in other instances, the tormentor of the
Mater dolorosa was the very same state as constituted by politicians,
public officials and bureaucrats, the “bad Father-State” as Alvarez
Junco puts it (572). The stepmother trope seems to be the result of
an exacerbation in the perception of this malignancy of the state
and the power apparatuses. The wickedness of the father-state and
all its corollaries and hypostasis grows so outrageous and pervasive
that the nation itself, the mother, gets infected, is impregnated by
him, becoming evil herself or at least an accessory to the crime and,
hence, highly suspicious of foul play. The next development, as any
fairy tale will tell, would be the widowing of the new mother, finally
alone as the object of blame.
In the final phase of the dictatorship and the first years of the
democratic transition, oppositional cinema produced a new avatar
of the Spanish mother as hinted by the last scenes of Black Brood.
In these family tales, so well reconstructed by Kinder, the father was
frequently absent and the patriarchal or phallic mother had the bewildering destiny of being the displaced incarnation of authoritarian power, its source of violence, and both the object of desire and
belligerent rebellion of her offspring (Blood 198-200). Kinder claims
that Spanish cinema of that time exceeds just about any other in the
number of matricides (232); José Luis Borau, in turn, has told the
anecdote that at the wedding of Gutiérrez Aragón, co-screenwriter
of his Furtivos ‘Poachers’ (1975)—which, of course, also comes to a
close with one of those matricides—he was confronted by the moth-
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er of the groom, widow of a Falangist, with the question, “Dígame,
Borau, ¿qué tienen mi hijo y usted contra las madres?” ‘Tell me Borau, what do you and my son have against mothers?’ (qtd. in Inma
Garrido 82). In order to answer that query it is imperative to keep
in mind the historical fortunes of the maternal images of the nation,
particularly the increasingly abhorrent appearance of Spain as stepmother during the dictatorship period. In addition, Kinder provides
a second part of the answer by invoking the long-standing tradition
of terrible matriarchs, most of them widows as well, in Spanish letters. She mentions Benito Pérez Galdós’s Doña Perfecta from the
eponymous novel (1876), Leopoldo Alas Clarín’s Doña Paula from
La Regenta (1884-5), and Federico García Lorca’s Bernarda from
his rural tragedy La casa de Bernarda Alba ‘The House of Bernarda
Alba’ (1936) (Blood 199-200). Her list of foremothers could actually
be greatly expanded with titles like Casandra, novel and play, also by
Galdós, (1905, 1910), García Lorca’s Bodas de sangre ‘Blood Wedding’
(1933), El adefesio ‘The Monstrosity’ by Rafael Alberti (1944), Carlos Muñiz’s Las viejas difíciles ‘The Difficult Old Women’(1961-62),
Francisco Nieva’s Malditas sean Coronada y sus hijas ‘Coronada and
Her Daughters Be Damned’ (1978), and even with the mother in a
minor role, La familia de Pascual Duarte ‘The Family of Pascual Duarte’ (1942) by Camilo José Cela, adapted to the screen by Ricardo
Franco and released the same year of Furtivos’ first screening and
the ultimate demise of the other Franco, the dictator: 1975.2 Let me
draw attention to the fact that a mere intrinsic reading of most of
these texts does not always justify the symbolic pairing of the terrible mother and the nation. Certainly Doña Perfecta is a representation of the most reactionary political and religious ideologies in
and about Spain. Similarly, Bernarda Alba and the mothers in Bodas
de sangre and La familia de Pascual Duarte stand for a rural atavism
that frequently has been either praised or derided as the authentic
core of the nation. Nevertheless, it is the considerable parallel flow
of images of Spain as mother that propelled a national interpretation of those infamous maternal figures by enforcing upon them a
sort of fatal intertext. Notably, the later onset of the negative image
of “stepmother Spain” infused the formidable matriarchs of all those
texts with an ever-growing potential to be retrospectively read in
those national terms, fueling in this way a circular and self-perpet-
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uating intertextual movement of maternal characters and images of
the nation mostly delineated in dreadfully unfavorable terms.
Obviously, in these textual operations and symbolic transactions there is more than a speck of patriarchal misogyny with its
tendency towards scapegoating women. On the other hand, considering that Francoism had so persistently co-opted the image of the
mother-nation (Ballesteros, “Mujer” 377, 381), so adamantly enlisted the family as an emblem of the new and eternal Spain (Kinder,
Blood 238; Ballesteros, Cine 272), and so vigorously enacted an allencompassing censorship that surely would not have tolerated similarly negative depictions of the father, it is understandable that one
of the most appropriate avenues in which to channel a subversive
filmic discourse was to demonize the mother against the backdrop
of the political underpinnings and symbolic connotations of the
family drama (Kinder, Blood 238). But, then again, let me propose
that the situation in Spain reaches a point during the Franco years in
which the opposition to the dictatorship apparently sank into utter
pessimism and began to perceive a historical contingency, a political
regime, as something permanent, inherent, as an ineluctable determinism embedded in the nation itself. In that predicament, the biological and psychological parameters of the maternal image made it
more befitting to express the national feeling than that of the patriarch. Fathers and state models might come and go, and could never
completely assuage the suspicion of imposture and illegitimacy, but
nations and natural mothers are thought to be incontrovertible. The
Franco regime managed to shape, appropriate, occupy and taint so
many aspects of the nation—language, emblems, culture, history—
that Spain and her maternal projections wound up being seen as
constitutionally authoritarian, repressive, reactionary, violent, and
intolerant. The matricide was therefore absolutely justified, even
indispensable, although it never resulted in a joyous liberation but
rather in the grim perpetuation of the cycle of violence through the
mimicry by the child of the ways of the mother. In the relationship
between those Spanish mothers and their sons, love usually became
incestuous and justifiable rebellion turned criminal. It would take
time until the anti-Francoists would be able to conjoin the democratic creed with the symbols and icons of Spain. Alas, for some,
like many Basque and Catalan nationalists for which Spain is an es-
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sentially fascist country, that marriage still would prove unthinkable
almost thirty-five years after the death of the dictator.
The high point of the patriarchal or phallic mother offered as
cinematic image of the nation can be dated to 1975, coinciding with
Franco’s death. That year Furtivos and Pascual Duarte—both accurately including the killing of the mother—were released and rapidly became the two most important and controversial movies of their
time. To a degree, this development had been foreshadowed by some
of Carlos Saura’s films—Ana y los lobos ‘Ana and the Wolves,’ (1972)
and El jardín de las delicias ‘The Garden of Delights’ (1970)—and by
novels such as Ana María Matute’s Primera Memoria ‘First Memory’
(1960) in which the matriarchal grandmother anticipates from her
island domain some of the traits and the political implications of
the new articulation of the mother figure in the Spanish movies of
the 1970s. Allowing for a greater or lesser degree of variation, after
1975 the trend continued with the documentary El desencanto ‘The
Disenchantment’ (Jaime Chávarri, 1976), Camada negra (1977),
Mamá cumple cien años ‘Mamá Turns One Hundred’ (Saura, 1979),
Siete días de enero ‘Seven Days in January’ (Juan Antonio Bardem,
1979), Bodas de sangre ‘Blood Wedding’ (Saura, 1980), Demonios en
el jardín ‘Demons in the Garden’ (Gutiérrez Aragón, 1982), and La
casa de Bernarda Alba ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’ (Mario Camus, 1987). Curiously, some Basque directors were among the last
to keep producing stories that included this kind of motherhood, as
proven by La muerte de Mikel ‘The Death of Mikel’ (Imanol Uribe,
1983) and Alas de mariposa ‘Butterfly Wings’ (Juanma Bajo Ulloa,
1991). It is curious because although it would be expected that,
given the desire of independence from the Spanish state of a significant part of Basque society, a Basque director might have a greater
interest in maintaining a tyrannical, oppressive or spurious image of
the nation, Uribe’s and Bajo Ulloa’s mothers actually fail to function
as emblems of Spain, and in the case of the hieratic and probably
murderous matriarch of La muerte de Mikel, the symbolic referent
appears to be, of all things, the Basque motherland.
In spite of the persistence of the figure of the fearsome mother
on Spanish screens during the early years of the transition, and regardless of its inertial residues in the succeeding democratic period,
the country’s cinema of the 1980s ushered in a dazzling transforma-
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tion in the presentation of the maternal. In fact, the shift can be
traced back to the other major movie of 1975, Cría cuervos ‘Cria’
by Saura, whose film recurs to the old image of the mother-nation
as passive victim and martyr, in this case suitably at the hand of a
military and unscrupulous patriarch. The mother suffers a life of
seclusion, sickness, and frustration in a large house, strangely cut
off from the lively activity of the surrounding city, and inhabited
by five other women: the servant, the mute and paralyzed grandmother, and her three daughters. The father, who comes and goes
at will, reigns supreme over his gynaeceum. The mother, tortured
by marital unhappiness and unbearable physical pain, dies from an
undisclosed disease that affects the lower belly, in what we might
call the anatomical site of motherhood. As in Furtivos and Pascual
Duarte, the mother once again endures a violent death, but here
matricide is substituted by uxoricide, at least in the eyes of Ana,
the youngest daughter, who afterwards attempts to kill the father
by poisoning him and who for a time thinks that she has been successful when he presently turns up dead. The course of action taken
by the young Ana and the fact, as also noted by Marvin D’Lugo
(Films 133) and Susan Martin-Márquez (219), that when she plays
house with her sisters she enacts the role of the mother, adding a
novel component of strength, rebellion and determination, represent a clairvoyant anticipation of the upcoming fate of the maternal
in Spanish cinema. This anticipatory character is further certified
by the narrative technique of having an adult and future Ana, played
by the same Geraldine Chaplin who portrays the victimized mother,
intermittently interrupt the story with an articulate and sophisticated first-person narration delivered while gazing directly at the
audience from a close-up shot and against a neutral background.
In Saura’s 1975 movie, the grown-up Ana, maybe in her twenties or
thirties, looks back to the future of the new Spanish mothers of the
1980s, 1990s, and beyond.
By now it is already a truism that, after the end of the Franco
regime, one of the most urgent tasks of the new democratic period was to produce a redefinition of the Spanish national identity,
sequestered and monopolized for so many years by the ideological patchwork of the dictatorship. The preponderance of far more
positive maternal icons in Spanish cinema after the first years of
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the democratic transition has also been noted, although with less
emphasis and unanimity. What has not been sufficiently examined
is the centrality of the maternal figure, of its extraordinary revision and vindication against the dire history of her evil or martyred
foremothers, in the enterprise to rebuild, suture, and make over the
nation. Barbara Zecchi laments and critiques the socio-political
and psychological implications for women of the acute “pronatalist” drift in the Spanish films of the late 1990s: Puede ser divertido
‘It Could Be Fun’ (Azucena Rodríguez, 1996), Secretos del corazón
‘Secrets of the Heart’ (Montxo Armendáriz, 1997), Yerma ‘Barren’
(Pilar Távora, 1998), Cuando vuelvas a mi lado ‘When You Come
Back to My Side’ (Gracia Querejeta, 1999), Todo sobre mi madre ‘All
About My Mother’ (Pedro Almodóvar, 1999), and Solas ‘Alone’ (Benito Zambrano, 1999), among others (147-49). With a very different
outlook but within the same coordinates, Gerard Dapena focuses
on the last film and celebrates 1999 as “the year of the mother in
Spanish cinema” (26). Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas
move the phenomenon back to the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s, but even though they contrast the new “benign” mothers
with their phallic counterparts of the past, as described by Kinder,
they also gloss over the nationalistic dimension of the maternal figure in favor of issues of gender, indeed truly fundamental but surely
not the only ones at play (131-33). Kinder had already underscored
the dramatic liberation of “the maternal from the dreaded image of
the oppressive matriarchal mother” in some movies (“From” 145).
Nonetheless, after heralding the arrival of positive figures of the
mother—Mater amantisima by Josep A. Salgot, 1980, and La mitad
del cielo ‘Half of Heaven’ by Gutiérrez Aragón, 1986—in her seminal
Blood Cinema (213-14), Kinder has circumscribed her range to the
films of Almodóvar. Moreover, despite titles such as “Reinventing
the Motherland” and forceful statements about the potential metamorphosis “of vengeful patriarchal nations into nurturing motherlands” (Kinder “Reinventing” 22), her studies do not explore systematically in all its scope the symbolic reach of the new maternal
figures within the attempts to re-imagine the nation vis-à-vis the
wide historical background of the images of mother Spain.
The long and traumatic chronicle of the maternal image as a
representation of Spain and the conspicuous historical weight of the
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castrating matriarchs mobilized by the oppositional cinema of the
1970s, make almost peremptory the attribution of a national connotation to any subsequent cinematic mothers; all of them carry
a heavy intertextual baggage. Sometimes there are explicit though
subtle motifs or gestures of mise-en-scène that steer the interpretation of the film in that national direction. Since the movie poster,
Todo sobre mi madre activates a color scheme, a visual coherence,
based on the repetition of blue, red and yellow, as already mentioned by Paul Julian Smith (199), but beyond the pure aesthetic
effect of this chromatic choice the last two colors are inescapably
loaded with symbolic connotations by way of their reiteration of the
same palette of the national flag. Incidentally, the expressions “color
scheme” and “visual coherence” belong to the cinematic idiolect of
Almodóvar himself, which shows his conscious attention to detail
in this aspect of his movies (Smith 173; Strauss 67). Another of his
films, La flor de mi secreto ‘The Flower of my Secret’ (1995) displays
a political map of Spain in its central scene: its “mother scene,” again
in Almodóvar’s parlance (Patty 178). The map hangs above the bed
where the female protagonist lies down to die after taking a fistful
of pills to kill herself. An unexpected telephone call from her old
and rustic mother saves her life. Contrary to the interpretation of
D’Lugo, who talks about “the confining patriarchal ideology that is
embodied in the map” (Pedro 90), my contention is that the scene
coalesces the visual rendering of the nation with the providential
sound of the voice of the mother. As Almodóvar declares, the image
above our headboards is the symbol of our beliefs, what gives us
shelter and protection, something sacred (Patty 177). He also states
elsewhere that La flor de mi secreto is an unconscious homecoming to his “roots,” to “the mother” (La Flor 165). This kind of visual
cue can trigger the urge to read plot and characters as ciphers of
the nation, its destiny or its dreams, but generally what lends legitimacy to these interpretations, what validates them or required
their necessity in the first place, is the vast intertextual web that the
Spanish cultural discourse has been incessantly weaving for the last
two centuries.
The first and most evident constant in the new treatment of
the mother—let us say the maternal a priori in the Spanish cinema
roughly from the mid 1980s—is an almost unanimous attribution
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of sturdy benevolence paired with a sympathetic, even admiring,
cinematic rendering. As a complement to and a fulfillment of that
goodness, most of these movies observe a strong determination
to give their stories happy endings, rarely conventional but happy
nonetheless. You could say that these films endeavor to painstakingly correct the sad and terrible summary of the national chronicle
that the poet Jaime Gil de Biedma had famously rhymed in his 1967
poem “Apología y petición”: “Y qué decir de nuestra madre España
/ … De todas las historias de la historia / sin duda la más triste es la
de España / porque termina mal” ‘And what to say about our mother
Spain / … Of all the histories of History / surely Spain’s is the saddest
/ because it ends badly’ (82). Tellingly these are the most often quoted lines of the poem to the detriment of a later section where, after
wondering if the miseries of his people are truly an unshakable curse
of the country itself, the poet wills to imagine a different history of
Spain in which the decoupling of her corrupted and incompetent
governments from the pure idea of the nation comes finally into
effect (82-3). Some years later, many film directors would also take
upon themselves the task of imagining and shaping that alternative
history of the nation through the happy endings of their maternal
tales. In exemplary fashion, the two major movies that put a close
to the twentieth century, Solas and Todo sobre mi madre, go to such
great lengths to provide an idyllic ending to their heart-wrenching
stories that they have been accused of implausibility, utopianism or
naïveté. The directors, Deus ex machina, respectively fix the problem of a bitter and destitute single mother with the emotional and
economic support of an adoptive grandfather, and have a baby end
a cycle of death by miraculously neutralizing the HIV virus. As a
token of this willful optimism, a significant number of films of this
period end with the recent birth of a child or the prospect of a future one: Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios ‘Women on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’ (Almodóvar, 1988), Tacones lejanos
‘High Heels’ (Almodóvar, 1991), Secretos del corazón ‘Secrets of the
Heart’ (Armendáriz, 1997), Carne trémula ‘Live Flesh’ (Almodóvar,
1997)—framed by two births, one at the beginning and one at the
end—or, in a twisted way, El día de la bestia ‘The Day of the Beast’
(Alex de la Iglesia, 1997). The valetudinarian mother of the nineteenth century does not stop producing children of hope now.
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Not every trait and circumstance postulated about the new
mothers of Spanish cinema apply to all of them, and probably there
are only a few individual characters that exhibit the whole gamut of
these features. Furthermore, sometimes those qualities coexist side
by side with the remnants of previous versions of the maternal icon
in the representation of the imagined community. Such coexistence,
it could be argued, is, in a way, needed, for otherwise it would be
impossible to show a degree of continuity within the rupture, and
continuities are fundamental for constructing the idea of the nation. In close connection with the bounty of climactic births, one
of the most widespread qualities in the new generation of Spanish
mothers in film, with clear linkages to the past, is their condition of
nurturing matriarchs. After having a baby daughter, the protagonist
of the foundational La mitad del cielo moves to Madrid from the
provinces in the juncture between the 1950s and 1960s to become,
successively and successfully, a wet-nurse, a cook, the owner of a
semi unlawful food market stall, and the proprietor of a celebrated
restaurant. The culinary career as an extension of the more primal
breast-feeding prerogative finds later replicas in movies like Almodóvar’s Volver ‘Return’ (2006): the protagonist, Raimunda, also
opens a restaurant in a certain defiance of the law and, although her
daughter is already a teenager, we are constantly reminded of her
lactating prowess through overhead shots centered on her breast
and abundant cleavage that showcase her as a sort of twenty-first
century Spanish variation of the maggiorata so prevalent in Italy in
the more prosperous 1950s after the food scarcity in war and postwar periods (“Have you always had such big breasts?” asks her own
mother on one occasion).3 The story repeats itself with Elena, the
oceanic mother in Lucía y el sexo ‘Sex and Lucía,’ by Julio Medem
(2001), who is praised as a consummate purveyor of paella, that
most stereotypical Spanish dish. Two years before Medem’s film,
Manuela in Todo sobre mi madre used to own a small eating and
drinking establishment on the beach, and later cooks and feeds everybody around her. In the same year, the old mother of Solas is
insistently shown preparing and serving food, and when she dies
her daughter proudly confides to her in a visit to the cemetery that
her just-born baby is devouring her breasts.
It is obvious, but not pointless to remark, that poverty and scar-
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city of food stubbornly reappear as an infamous refrain in the discourse of Spanish history. The contemporary cadre of nourishing
mothers in these films sets up a stark contrast with that history of
deprivation, inspiring a sense of well-being and contentment with
the national affiliation hitherto not that common. There is no shortage of problems in the country, they seem to say, but the nation will
provide. The distance is immense from the impotent and famished
mother Spain of the nineteenth century or from the careless stepmother of the twentieth century. The relationship, though, with the
1970s phallic mothers such as Martina in Furtivos, is rather more
complex. In this film, written by Gutiérrez Aragón with Borau ten
years before his own La mitad del cielo, Martina is also the wet-nurse
of the governor—allegedly a mocking stand-up of Franco himself—
a cook in her own right, and the owner of a rural tavern that serves
food to political hierarchs on hunting outings, civil guards, and
rangers in charge of keeping an eye in the Spanish forest. Aside from
the difference between the locales of the two food outlets–dark and
sinister versus elegant and charming–and between the physical appeal of their owners, played by scrawny old Lola Gaos and the ever
more attractive Angela Molina throughout the movie, there is also
a noteworthy divergence in the way they carry out their nurturing
personas. Martina mostly caters to the high and low echelons of the
regime, and when she serves her food—pointedly milk with all its
boiling cream—to the lover that her son has brought home to her
chagrin, the young fugitive woman vomits it in disgust; eventually
the mother-in-law will kill her. Martina’s nourishing side is overwhelmed by her simultaneous condition of “devouring mother,” to
use Kinder’s expression (Blood 233). Borau has confessed that the
first idea of the film came to him when he saw Gaos playing Saturna
in Buñuel’s Tristana (1973); the film would be about a female Saturn devouring his son in a forest (Sánchez 19-20). Getting Martina’s
food, Martina’s milk, exacts a heavy toll, a reality visually announced
by Iván Zulueta’s publicity poster for the movie: an animalesque
Martina stands on her incestuous son’s shoulders with sagging
breasts and a big open mouth–vagina dentata–emphasized by the
lack of any other facial features.4 Although Rosa’s food enterprises
in La mitad del cielo also serve the ranks of the regime, her clientele
at the national table is much more demotic than Martina’s. She is
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more entrepreneurial too, and becomes the active agent of her own
story and of the collective history as well. The theme of the movie
could be formulated as the chronicle of the transformation of a rural
society into an urban and industrial one, a historical phenomenon
that began in the late 1950s and to which can be credited a decisive
importance in the economic, political, and ideological modernization of the nation. In Gutiérrez Aragón’s movie, the sterling protagonist of that change is Rosa; the mother topples the man—the
state—from his historical pedestal. The central axis of Spain in La
mitad del cielo is food, the search for it, its commerce, distribution
and preparation, and in Katherine Singer Kovacs’s words, “throughout the movie food is the realm of female power” (36).
La mitad del cielo is exposed to an understandable feminist critique for reducing women to a nurturing role in accordance with
the most traditional patriarchal script. In addition, Rosa receives
her training in nourishing from the usually conservative rural past,
from her grandmother Olvido, who ceremoniously shares with
her milk cream spread on bread at the beginning of the story; no
vomiting this time. Martin-Márquez defends the movie against this
charge with the arguments of ecofeminism (233-34, 238-39), but
there is more to be said. First, although in Gutiérrez Aragón’s movie
the mother nurtures, and offers herself as food, she is never spent.
Second, the movie, along with many of the others alluded to here,
favors a matrilineal lineage. Third, in La mitad del cielo nourishing is not a male imposition on the mother but a female exclusive
privilege and an active decision. As evidence, the mother not only
nurtures with her food but, as in a Derridean pharmakopea, she also
knows how to kill with that food those who curtail her agency or try
to enforce their authoritarianism on her. Rosa’s tutor, grandmother
Olvido, feeds milk cream and bread to her and her daughter, but she
also seems to poison the husband of the former and father of the latter with, to add to the irony, a suspicious jar of preserves. This is not
by any means an isolated incident in the criminal annals of Spanish
cinema. Ana had already tried to poison her father and aunt with a
glass of milk in Cría Cuervos; the same Ana who while rewriting her
mother’s role still practices breast-feeding with her doll and begs the
maid to show her the opulence of her bosom, the common people’s
breast. A few years later, Almodóvar’s Gloria kills her abusive hus-
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band in the kitchen with a serrano ham bone dutifully cooked afterwards in ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? ‘What Have I Done to
Deserve This?’ (1984). In Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios,
Pepa simply contents herself with adding sleeping pills to her gazpacho to knock out a couple of policemen intruding in her penthouse. Finally, in Volver, Raimunda does not do the killing herself
but assumes the guilt of her daughter who, off camera, has stabbed
her stepfather to death with a kitchen knife, which previously and
afterwards was seen brandished ostentatiously by the mother over
the cutting board or the sink in shots that at times focus both on the
weapon and on the mother’s breast. Raimunda, as anticipated by repentant romance novelist Amanda Gris in La flor de mi secreto, will
hide the corpse in the freezer of the restaurant where she has squatted. For the sake of clarity, here the one at fault is the stepfather—no
stepmothers in sight—for trying to rape the teenage daughter of his
wife, at the time unaware of the lack of blood ties with her attacker.
Incest is also the reason why Raimunda’s own mother lights a fire to
kill her husband.
The killing mother is as much a staple of recent Spanish cinema
as her nurturing counterpart, and many times both roles are played
by the same person. Again, this is dangerously close to the phallic
mothers of Furtivos or Camada negra. The awesome power remains
the same: Gloria’s ham bone, Raimunda’s knife, grandmother Olvido peeing standing up while she smokes cigars, Manuela crushing
Agrado’s assailant’s head in Todo sobre mi madre. But now, through
repetition, that force is coded as feminine and its target as masculine, at least the eternal masculine legacy of the arch-patriarchal
Francoist state, ritualistically and therapeutically killed in every
movie by the new nation. Even when the mother dies, as in Solas
and Tacones lejanos, lets herself die, as in La mitad del cielo, or kills
herself for the good of the daughter, as the “red” mother of Nadie
hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto ‘Noboby Will Speak of
Us When We Are Dead’ (Agustín Díaz Yanes, 1995), the strength
does not diminish but rather, enhanced, is passed on to the new
embodiments of the mother (Jordan & Tamosunas 132), and their
deaths are more heroic acts of courage than resigned martyrdom.
The dualities seen up to here in the configuration of mother
and motherland in contemporary Spanish cinema—text/intertext,
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past/present, tradition/modernity, biology/will, nurturing/killing—
finds a narrative correlative in the plot ploy of the two mothers. This
double maternal presence is almost universal in all the films discussed. Rather than a simplistic moral or ideological Manichaeism,
the slash that articulates the dichotomy is temporal, historic; most
of the time we have an old and a young mother. It is true that often
the junior mother is placed in the higher hierarchical position within the value system of the film. This is the situation in Iziar Bollaín’s
Hola, ¿estás sola? ‘Hi, Are You Alone’ (1995), Flores de otro mundo
‘Flowers from Another World’ (1999) and Te doy mis ojos ‘I Give You
My Eyes’ (2003) or in Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre. However,
occasionally it is the old maternal figure, as in Solas or A mi madre
le gustan las mujeres ‘My Mother Likes Women’ (Daniela Féjerman
and Inés París, 2002), who is the one occupying the preeminent side
of the dichotomy. There are still movies where it is uncertain who
holds that privilege: ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto?, La mitad
del cielo, Tacones lejanos, La flor de mi secreto, or Carne trémula.
At any rate, the hierarchy is very infrequently presented in absolute
terms—there are very few, if any at all, unredeemable villains in the
maternal category—and the relation between the two mothers is
always quite complicated. In some instances, there is an inversion
of established expectations, one of the mothers in the pair taking
the qualities conventionally attributed to the other. A case in point
is the lesbian mother in A mi madre le gustan las mujeres, ironically played by Rosa María Sardá, the Catalan actress who through
her roles in Todo sobre mi madre and Te doy mis ojos might have
come to be seen as a specialist at portraying conservative and older
maternal figures. Additionally or concurrently, there are all sorts of
interchanges and transactions of traits between the two contrasting
mothers throughout the story, as Zecchi has observed for example
in Solas (150). Finally, it is not uncommon that, from the beginning,
the dichotomy is already internalized in one of the members of the
pair of opposites. In Todo sobre mi madre, the old mother has a clear
deficit of traditional maternal virtues. Meanwhile, the worldly, mobile, and modern Manuela encompasses many of the features of the
proverbial angel of the house, of the abnegated heroine of melodramas, or of the model woman of the Francoist Sección Femenina:
she is generous and selfless, a domestic nurse and a cook; she is
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a mother. Of course, at the same time she is a competent and accomplished professional who with uncanny nonchalance shows her
disposition to associate herself with all kinds of dubious—the word
is intentional—characters: prostitutes, partial transsexuals like her
husband and her protégée Agrado, pregnant nuns, lesbians, forgers,
and actresses.
The irregularities, alterations and slippages in the dualistic maternal scheme of these films demonstrate the attempt to get away
with a daring balancing act. Taking them heuristically as a whole, as
a single cinematic discourse, Spanish contemporary movies about
the mother strive to prevent the risk of any old or new monopoly
on the idea of the nation, especially if it is imposed by tyrannical
decree, while avoiding a fluidity run-amok, a loss of its collective
identity in a wholesale and standardized postmodernity. There is
a utopian desire to coalesce preservation with break up, historical
continuity with a new foundation. These movies show an eagerness
to keep exorcizing, clubbing, poisoning, burning and stabbing the
phantoms of the Francoist past and beyond, alongside the determination to rescue, appropriate, and maintain entire chunks of that
past regardless of political correctness or of accusations, perhaps
founded at times, of reactionary historical nostalgia.
The temporal, moral and ideological Janus-like condition of
the new maternal representation of the nation in Spanish cinema
has a fitting counterpart in the kind of families founded around it.
Truly, Protean would be a better adjective and mythical reference
than Janus-like to qualify the new mother and her family, of course
a female Proteus not only willing to reveal the future but keen on
shaping it. Under the sign of the nascent mother, Spanish cinema
has indulged in the exhaustion of all possible geographical, economic, and social heterodoxies about the family. In ¿Qué he hecho
yo para merecer esto? the eventual family unit materializes in the
pairing of the mother and the homosexual son who returns home
because “every house needs a man.” At the end of La mitad del cielo,
Rosa plots, orders, and organizes the wedding of her lover with his
girlfriend, thus inverting the usual roles of the traditional Spanish
tale of the man and his mistress. The official household will only
include her and her daughter. After saving him from being killed,
Pepa rejects her desperately sought-after lover up to that point, and
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decides to have her baby alone in Mujeres al borde de un ataque
de nervios. The denouement of Solas offers a family made up by
the recent Andalusian mother, the baby daughter, and an Asturian
adoptive grandfather. Two divorced girlfriends engaged in a maternal-filial relationship improvise a family when the younger one has
a child in Puede ser divertido. The couple that acts as a happy foil
in Te doy mis ojos combines an Irishman and the Spanish sister of
the battered protagonist. The last scenes of A mi madre le gustan las
mujeres celebrates the union of a Spanish mother of three daughters
and her Czech lesbian lover, with both families cheering and dancing around them. The pregnant double killer of Tacones lejanos joins
with a male judge who doubles by night as her mother’s transvestite
impersonator. The family picture of Flores de otro mundo includes
a Dominican mulatta, her two children from a previous relationship, the Castilian husband and his old-fashioned and rural mother.
In Carne trémula, the beginning of the movie presents a prostitute
mother from Madrid giving birth to the male hero in a public bus,
and the end, twenty-six years later, shows the birth of a second baby,
fruit of the marriage of an affluent Italian woman and the now exconvict son of the prostitute. The variations are endless.5
Maybe the hyperbolic epitome of this plethora of polymorphic
perversions of the ideal Spanish Catholic family consecrated for such
a long time as the only one true to the nation, is Manuela in Todo sobre mi madre. The national maternal figure in Almodóvar’s movie is
an Argentine immigrant living between Madrid and Barcelona, the
wife of a male chauvinist bisexual compatriot endowed with a natural penis and Parisian prosthetic breasts, the biological mother of a
Spanish son whose heart ends up in a Galician’s chest, the adoptive
parent of the baby of her estranged husband and a Catalan nun, and
the cordial apex of a trinity completed by a southern transsexual
and a nomadic lesbian actress. All these kaleidoscopic facets of the
mother bespeak a vision of Spain under the specter of a militant and
programmatic hybridism. The mechanism to achieve such a goal
could be characterized as a perversion of eugenics, a process whose
objective is not the preservation of some kind of purity or homogeneity but its systematic contamination to produce something better
or, as Agrado would ironically have it, something “more authentic.”
The words of the transsexual in Todo sobre mi madre reveal the per-
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plexing antinomy of a nation that aspires to the condition of the
hybrid without losing its specificity or that ciphers the maintenance
of its character in its desire for an unbounded hybridism.
There is an intriguing reversal of historical fortunes in Todo
sobre mi madre: the motherland, “la madre patria,” is saved by her
former colonies, by the daughter nations. For some, this fable might
function as an atonement, a parody, or an inversion of the primordial Spanish journey, that of the country’s most famous or infamous
maternal feat, the conquest of America. The typical coupling of the
conquering nation and its overseas offspring is turned upside down:
the transatlantic Manuela is now the redeeming mother of the
metropolis of years past. This ultimate confusion between parent
and child, between former empire and old subjects, accomplished
through the rectification of history, encapsulates the meticulous
realignment of traits, categories and taxonomies put in motion by
Spanish cinema to push for the rebirth of the mother nation at the
end of the millennium.
Notes
1 Alison Sinclair has studied the Spanish “gendered objects of nation,” specially the mother, in writers of this period such as Angel Ganivet, Machado and
Miguel de Unamuno (184-89).
2 For a study of the “terrible woman” in Spanish theatre, see María Paz Pintané’s
dissertation on the topic.
3 Peter William Evans has brilliantly analyzed Zulueta’s poster along similar
lines (118).
4 Maggiorata, short for maggioratta fisica, was an expression popularized by
Italian actor and film director Vitorrio de Sica in 1952 in reference to busty and
curvaceous actresses such as Gina Lollobrigida.
5 The formation of alternative and non-conventional families in contemporary
Spanish cinema has been extensively studied in the case of Almodóvar’s oeuvre.
See, for instance, Alejandro Yarza (33), Stephen Maddison (281), Manuel Pérez
Baena (184), Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz (60), Ann Davies (90), or Anne Hardcastle 79-82, 89-91. The issue, with some exceptions, has not received as much
attention in films by other directors (Zecchi 152, Ballesteros, Cine 277-78).
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